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Is it possible to achieve my specific goal w/ exiftool?

Started by Mia, June 04, 2014, 05:04:09 AM

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Mia

Hi,

I've never used exiftool and am an utter newbie. I'd like to accomplish a specific task and wonder if exiftool can do it (or if it can be done at all – 5 hrs research, much frustration and I still don't know). I hope you can help.

My situation:
I have jpegs created from print and neg scans. The subjects are well known rock musicians and I want to have my copyright info embedded in them if someone downloads them from my site. However, I don't want to embed this information to each jpeg in a manner that involves having to "save" the changes to them because I've had image degradation issues w/ too many "saves", even though I use no compression (areas that were "dusted" take on a weird moiré effect – not good).

All my website jpeg photos are in 1 folder. I want to associate the same copyright data with each photo. Is it possible for me to keep my current photos in the website folder untouched and add a metadata "sidecar" XMP file so that anyone who downloads a jpeg photo from my site receives a version with the copyright info embedded in it? If so, can exiftool achieve this task?

Based on something I read online, I experimented and uploaded to my website image folder an XMP file created in Photoshop that contains my desired copyright info – it has the same file name as one of my pics, but with the .xmp extension instead if .jpg. I then went to my site and downloaded that photo, but found it devoid of my copyright info.

As I'm sure you've gathered, I'm no computer whiz. Perhaps I performed my experiment incorrectly, or perhaps what I wish to achieve is not possible at all? I've tried & tried to figure this out on my own without success. Any advice (in terms a new-new-newbie can understand) would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Mia

Phil Harvey

Hi Mia,

It is not possible to do what you want with a sidecar file.  However, embedding the copyright in the metadata of the file using ExifTool will not affect the image quality.  The image itself is never changed by ExifTool.  The command to do this to an entire directory looks like this:

exiftool -copyright="some copyright string" DIR

where DIR is the name of the directory.

- Phil
...where DIR is the name of a directory/folder containing the images.  On Mac/Linux/PowerShell, use single quotes (') instead of double quotes (") around arguments containing a dollar sign ($).

Mia

Thanks so much for your helpful reply. I'll download Exiftool and give it a go!